Crime in the Crescent City
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
For many authors, the best book of a career is the first, and sometimes it’s the second or third. It is seldom the 25th, but that is exactly the case with “The Tin Roof Blowdown” (Simon & Schuster, 373 pages, $26), the novel that James Lee Burke was born to write, and that no one else possibly could have written.
Most readers of mystery fiction have read books by Mr. Burke, and if they haven’t become devotees of his complex and decent hero, Dave Robicheaux, they lack soul. It’s easy now to speak of his evident brilliance, both as a stylist of rare elegance and a storyteller to rival everybody’s favorite camp counselor.
But it wasn’t always so. After publishing three “serious” novels between 1965 and 1971, his entire literary output consisted of a paperback western in 1983 and two books published by Louisiana State University Press in 1985 and 1986. The first Robicheaux novel, “The Neon Rain,” was published in 1987. With the creation of the Cajun detective, Mr. Burke added an important and memorable character to the roll call of uniquely American literary heroes.
“The Tin Roof Blowdown” opens as warnings are issued about the impending strike of Hurricane Katrina to the untenable city of New Orleans. The description of the tidal surge, and the explosive force of a Category 5 hurricane (several times greater than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima) is almost unbearably evocative of what it must have been like to be in its path — told in a straightforward, journalistic tone, but wrapped in compassion.
There was enough television, newspaper, magazine, and other media coverage of Katrina to last four lifetimes and, candidly, I thought I’d had my fill. But no one, not even the hundreds of hours of film footage that catalogued every tragedy visited upon that city, so powerfully gave this northerner the sense of terror, powerlessness, and hopelessness chronicled in these pages by Mr. Burke.
Weighing heaviest on the heart is the inhumanity of the predators who chose that time to break the connection that we want to believe all of mankind embraces as part of the same species. Stories of the looting, vandalism, arson, raping, and even killing that occurred during that crisis, while shocking and incomprehensible (you mean people really tried to kill the workers in boats and helicopters who were risking their own lives to rescue them?), take on a new horror when brought to life by Mr. Burke, himself a longtime resident of New Orleans.
As law enforcement officers descend on what has become a region suddenly in the hands of Visigoths, Robicheaux, a sheriff in nearby New Iberia, is assigned to capture a pair of serial rapists, a drug-addicted priest who lives with a prostitute, and a vigilante with a high-powered rifle.
As he lifts rocks to discover ever fouler vermin, Robicheaux tries to maintain his compassion even when his own daughter is threatened by Ronald Bledsoe, a sociopath so menacing that the cop is tempted to violence, as is his former partner, now a bounty hunter named Cletus Purcel, a heavy drinking redneck who regards all criminals as “puke,” a favorite expression of Mr. Burke’s police officers.
Interconnected plot elements fill the pages to the brim, as do many of Mr. Burke’s archetypes. Since it could be convincingly argued that Louisiana has been the most corrupt of America’s 50 states for a very long time, it is not surprising to find members of the Mafia with roles to play, adding a genteel menace as counterpoint to the sheer ignorant brutality of the street thugs. Mr. Burke holds special contempt for businessmen who make indecent fortunes because of political connections, and he has one in particular lurk in the shadows of the story.
For all the poetic beauty of the prose, the elegiac snapshots of the region of which Mr. Burke is so fond, there are numerous examples of the crude humor which cops use to retain their sanity.
A cop tells Cletus they’ve just arrested a couple of looters. “These pukes just ripped off the most dangerous gangster in New Orleans,” he says, laughing so hard that tears roll down his cheeks. “Hey, kid, if you stole anything from Sidney Kovick, mail it to him COD from Alaska, then buy a gun and shoot yourself. With luck, he won’t find your grave.”
“The Tin Roof Blowdown” is the best book of the year. Novels this good can be counted on one hand of a narcoleptic carpenter.
Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.